April 24, 2024 On Music The Art of the Libretto: John Adams By Sophie Haigney John Adams. Photograph by Deborah O’Grady. This week, a new production of the composer John Adams’s oratorio El Niño opened at the Metropolitan Opera, where it will run until May 17. El Niño is Adams’ rewriting of the Nativity story, and his libretto—cowritten with stage director Peter Sellars, in one their many collaborations—draws on source texts as wide-ranging the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and Mexican poetry written in the sixties. The text of the libretto reminded me of an assemblage poem as much as an opera. I spoke to Adams, who has composed some of the most notable contemporary operas, among them Nixon in China, for our Art of The Libretto series. We talked over Zoom recently about the joys and pains of collaboration, learning and then setting Spanish text to music, his life as a Californian, and his attempt to write his own Messiah. INTERVIEWER How did El Niño begin for you? JOHN ADAMS I’d been asked by the Châtelet in Paris to create something to celebrate for the millennium. So I began to think about what the millennium was and what was special about the year 2000. It also reminded me that ever since I was a kid, I had always loved Handel’s Messiah, which speaks to that time of year, because it’s also about birth, optimism, and hope. I thought that the millennium as a celebration should have something to do with these emotions. If you want to put it in another way, I wanted to write my own Messiah. Read More
April 23, 2024 Dinner Parties Bad Dinner Guest By Laurie Stone Photographic print by Frank Scholten, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I ruined a dinner party ten years ago in Phoenix. Among the guests was a judge who said abortion was an issue that reasonable people could disagree on, and I opened my mouth. At that time, Richard was teaching at the sprawling university in Tempe. We were at the home of two people we were lucky even talked to us. The woman in the couple was a brilliant sculptor. She built whole cities out of clay, where invisible inhabitants take refuge from the “everlasting no” I often represent. The man was a tenderhearted and sexy archaeologist, who was heading a big fat famous institute on human origins and the kind of primate behavior that accounts for actions like mine. He was, like me, a Jew from the East Coast, and he recognized in me a collegial form of urban unrefinement he liked. Read More
April 22, 2024 First Person Encyclopedia Brown: A Story for My Brother, Philip Seymour Hoffman By Emily Barr Philip, Emily, and their dog, Tess, in the summer of 1990. Photograph by Marilyn O’Connor. “What do you do with the old magazines when the new issues come out?” I asked the librarian. “At the end of the year, we donate them to neighborhood schools so kids can cut them up and make collages,” she replied. Our small public library is relatively new, sparsely filled with only the most popular items: a smattering of pregnancy and parenting books, mostly on sleep training; the latest mystery novels; DVDs on how to build your own she-shed; and a few shelves of history and religion to round it out. We live in a master-planned community filled with parks in a kid-friendly city, so the children’s section is by far the biggest part of the library. This library is very different from the Rochester Public Library close to where I grew up in New York. I can remember our mom bringing my older brother, Phil, and me to the main branch downtown during school breaks to pass the time. The children’s room was so tucked away you had to crawl through a tiny child-size secret wooden door to get to it. That was my favorite part. The library, which opened in 1936, was massive, dark, and quiet, but inside that small room, there were tall windows where the sun splashed from the Genesee River onto the colorfully illustrated book covers. I wanted to check out dozens of books but knew that my mom would get frustrated trying to find the overdue items missing somewhere in our messy room while late fees piled up. Read More
April 19, 2024 Lectures On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China By Yan Lianke Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED. When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him? To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors. Read More
April 18, 2024 Dinner Parties In Warsaw By Elisa Gonzalez The End of Dinner, Jules-Alexandre Grün, 1913. Public domain. In our new Spring issue, we published the short story “The Beautiful Salmon” by Joanna Kavenna. It features one of the most disastrous-sounding dinner parties I’ve ever read about in fiction, which is a meaningful distinction; it is also very funny at times and slightly surreal and imbued with a kind of offbeat philosophical bent. “People often talk about learning experiences and, in the days after the salmon-based fiasco, I wondered about this,” the narrator says, at the end of the story. And it’s a good question: What do we learn from an experience like this? Anything at all? “The Beautiful Salmon” made me think of dinner parties I’d attended or hosted—ones that had gone well and ones that had gone quite poorly and ones that had gone just fine, so that they mostly escaped my memory except for the specific dish or the offhand comment that has stuck with me for years. The significance of these moments, when we’re sharing meals with a group of people, often with a certain sense of occasion, have a particular type of comedy and drama that is often hard to distill or decipher. And so I asked some writers we admire to write short essays on dinner parties they remembered, often long after the dishes were removed from the sink. —Sophie Haigney, web editor Irresolute, no, shivering, I was waiting—lingering—outside the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which I had not yet seen beyond the entrance hall and the large auditorium, in which I’d just attended an event honoring the Swedish writer Lars Gustafsson, who had died a few months before. (The only real names in this story are the names of the dead.) The event, conducted in Polish and Swedish, was unintelligible to me, but my understanding was not a priority: it was one of the few invitations I’d received since moving to Warsaw two months before, and I accepted all of them, catholic in my pursuit of a real life. So far I had only an apartment, a rhythm of groceries and laundry, early mornings at a desk, and daily trips by tram to a cold classroom for language lessons. Technically, we hadn’t yet passed from autumn to winter, but it was as cold as any winter in New York. Lingering there, hoping to catch sight of someone I’d already met, specifically the woman who had invited me, I was wearing a blue wool coat, several years old and oversize in such a way that I looked tubular. But its bright, almost azure hue might draw attention in the swirl of black. In the middle of this event, a string quartet had performed several songs—études by Chopin, I learned from the program—and I’d realized that for me, and perhaps for no one else in the audience, the music and the words were exactly the same. Both signified nothing except sound. And, still lingering, now concluding that I should probably just walk to the tram stop and give up on the idea of any continuation of the evening, I thought that this, the event, but also my daily life in a country in which I spoke approximately five hundred words of the language, was the closest I’d ever get to actually remembering childhood before language, when people must have talked all the time around me without my comprehending words as words. Read More
April 17, 2024 At Work “Throwing Yourself Into the Dark”: A Conversation with Anne Carson By Kate Dwyer Anne Carson. Photograph by Peter Smith. Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A theatrical set piece painted by Ragnar Kjartansson leaned against the wall. Out the window: the ocean and Iceland’s barren expanse. “America seems so cluttered, vegetatively,” Carson said. “Trees everywhere, plants all over the place, flowers. Here it’s just empty. There’s lava, there’s the sea. There’s just lines. Empty space.” Empty space is one of Carson’s creative playgrounds. “Lecture on the History of Skywriting”—the centerpiece of her latest collection, Wrong Norma—is narrated by the sky, or space itself personified. Formally, where other Sappho translators have filled the gaps between the ancient poet’s fragments, Carson’s If Not, Winter marks the negative space with brackets, emphasizing that lines and stanzas have been lost to history. Carson has often explored absence-as-presence: Eros the Bittersweet argues that desire comes from lack, while Nox, an elegy for her late brother, Michael, mourns the final absence of someone who had long been missing from her life. We were there to talk about Wrong Norma, Carson’s first original work in seven years, which she called “a collection of disparate pieces, not a coherent thing with a throughline or themes or a way you have to read it.” But images, phrases, and ideas recur: bread, blood, pebbles, a fox, lawyers, a heart of darkness, John Cage, the word wrong, and various flavors of wrongness, for example. “I don’t have much to say,” Carson remarked. Yet over a pair of hour-long conversations, we found plenty to talk about. INTERVIEWER Tell me about the “wrongness” in the title of Wrong Norma. CARSON When people ask me, “How are Canadians different from Americans?” I say, “Canadians have one characteristic: they’re polite, but wrong.” All the time, polite but wrong. “Wrong” I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you’re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being “not wrong” every time you speak. So it’s kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling. It’s something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it’s a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It’s just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in. I could talk about wrongness tomorrow and say an entirely other thing. A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day. Read More